(Salle F106)

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  Furman, Reyhan (Bogazici University, Istanbul)
  Ozyurek, Asli (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)
  Shanley, Allen (Boston University, Boston)
  Brown, Amanda (Institute for Psycholinguistics, Boston)

What do gestures reveal about causal event representations across languages and ages ?

We examined the development of linguistic and gestural encoding of direct causation (i.e. a direct relation exists between the causer and the causee) in motion events in American and Turkish adults and 3-year-old children. 20 participants in each group watched and narrated two short animated video clips of direct causation incorporating both manner and path (a triangle object hits a round object and round object rolls up the hill into the sea). Speech and gestures were coded as depicting either the cause, or the result or both in one gesture or in one clause. English-speaking adults confl ated cause and result in one clause (e.g. the triangle guy pushes the tomato guy up) more than Turkish adults who depicted the event as two events (e.g. Eng. tr. green pushes tomato. tomato ascends the slope while rolling). While English-speaking children’s speech looked adult-like, Turkish 3-year-olds collapsed the subevents to one event (e.g. Eng. tr. he threw the tomato by the sea), unlike their adults. Gestural representations also changed crosslinguistically. Englishspeaking adults were more likely than Turkish ones to confl ate cause and result in their gestures and to use gestures representing only result. Turkish speakers used fewer confl ated gestures and focused more on cause. Children s gestures in both groups refl ected the adult patterns, showing gestures early sensitivity to linguistic descrip-tions of causal events. However, children also had a tendency to con- fl ate cause and result or to represent only result more than adults.¨ Our results show that gestural and linguistic expressions of direct causation differ across languages. They also point out to a universal developmental tendency to represent direct causation as a single event or to focus on the result in gesture. Results will be discussed in relation to cognition of direct causation (Wolff, 2003) as well as the expected typological differences in speech (Talmy, 1985) and gesture (Kita & Özyürek, 2003).